All of these monoprints were completed in my last year of grad school. Making them allowed me to think about my process of painting differently. Using a one-shot method such as monoprinting allowed me to loosen up and not worry so much about the end result of a piece.

To regain control that I felt like I lost from the process of such printing, I began to work back into the pieces with Sharpie and paint pen.

My works on paper become a way for me to slow down and really focus on the language and motifs I choose to represent. Each drawing starts with a gesture of one color. This gesture becomes the base for the drawing. I try to limit myself to only working on the drawing with black ink. There are a few exceptions where I will use another color, but I find the black ink/one paint color gesture pieces to be the most succesful. These works on paper really allow me to slow down and cultivate new ideas for the larger paintings.

These paintings were completed during the last semester of my 2nd year of graduate school. I began to tackle ideas surrounding doodling, graffiti, ordered chaos, and history. This was also the time I started to realize which materials I was most comfortable working in. I started working primarily on wood panels due to the different texture that it had in comparison to canvas. I also enjoyed the colors and wood grains that the panels offered to me as a base. It became much easier for me to start on a painting when there were already designs and colors to react to.

During this time I was living in San Francisco. I started to really explore all the themes and ideas that interested me the most about painting. I became heavily interested in the urban landscape. I began deconstructing objects, symbols, and colors found within that urban landscape into a deeply layered composition that echoed the chaos and I encountered in my daily life. Each element is a recalled visual memory, simplified into line, color, or form. These elements are then expanded and built upon acting as recalled memory often does, clouded and recontextualized over time.

I paint to create. I paint to build. I paint to make something that I want to see in the world.

After moving back to Baltimore from San Francisco I have continued to make work based on previous ideas and themes. I deconstruct objects, symbols, and colors found within the urban landscape into a deeply layered composition that echoes the chaos and visual noise I encounter in my daily life. Each element is a recalled visual memory, simplified into line, color, or form. These elements are then expanded and built upon acting as recalled memory often does, clouded and recontextualized over time.

The initial marks that I make in a painting start off simple, but then begin to build in complexity. Each mark and layer is a direct reaction to its predecessor; developing a painting while being cognizant of its recent history. Simplicity gives way to an ordered chaos of overlapping and often interconnected trains of thought. Each thought affects each other in a growing complex composition. Images appear chaotic and haphazard, but they are ordered in the way our consciousness weeds out visual impulses. Marks are enhanced or diminished by combining them with certain colors, utilizing contrasts and harmonies in hue, value, and saturation. I strive for my shapes to have a familiar, universality to them, yet at the same time look starkly foreign. I like for them to look as if they could exist somewhere around us, but remain unrecognizable. Allowing each painting to develop in this process oriented, evolutionary fashion, without the aid of preliminary sketches, keeps each painting fresh and vital. Using, re-using and manipulating a visual vocabulary of marks and shapes that develop from this process keeps each painting relative, but evolving.